Abstract

This paper offers a neo-Gramscian examination of the causes and processes underlying social restructuring in Bolivia between 1985 and 2005. Restructuring is understood as a worldwide political struggle by an expanding transnational historic bloc of elite social forces to reconfigure the capital-labour relation in order to sustain global capital accumulation. The transnational bloc expanded following the debt crisis of the early 1980s by incorporating transnationalised businessmen and technocrats beyond its transatlantic heartland. It also generated qualitative changes in the strategic approach of multilateral development institutions, which began to emphasise fiscal and monetary stability, the privatisation of accumulation, public-private partnerships, business class formation in the periphery, state-building and multilateralism. Meanwhile, Bolivia’s hyperinflationary crisis (1985) offered an opportunity for transnationalised elements of banking, mining and commercial fractions of Bolivian capital, to change the balance of forces within the three dominant political parties and vie for control of the state. This small elite nucleus, integrated into the transnational bloc primarily through official channels of development assistance, struggled against domestically-oriented elite forces and organised labour to restructure economic, ideological and institutional relations in the Bolivian space. These struggles involved the privatisation of accumulation, the attempt to build capital hegemony (i.e. to generate a consensual capitalist order) and the liberalisation of the state. Capital hegemony entailed equating ‘development’, ‘modernisation’ and capital accumulation.